President Trump's first remarks after meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong-Un were, for Trump, reasonably low-key. Credit for a straightforward attempt to ease nuclear tension was left to others for the most part.

What happens next will be fascinating. The summit in Singapore forces Trump's deepest haters to confront the unthinkable: that he actually did something they should applaud - and would be applauding if Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or almost anyone else had done it.

Finding fault this time won't be easy, but we can expect plenty of people to try. To some, it's not about easing nuclear tension, it's about Trump. Because to some, everything is about Trump.

Some will say being duped while others warn it doesn't really solve anything. They will refuse to give credit, not because of what Trump did but because it's Trump who did it.

That is intellectually bankrupt and totally unfair. If it flourishes, it will give the nation's undecided voters their best evidence by far that for all his glaring flaws, Trump's efforts are not being given a fair and objective shake by people more consumed with hating him than looking at the facts.

Anyone who felt a brief sit-down would resolve nearly 70 years of conflict was living a fairy tale. The Singapore summit was a start, not a finish.

If Trump is guilty of anything, it was his overly optimistic outlook about the future of the Korean peninsula. But when progress is made - even if that progress is a set of briefs talks that don't result in worse relations than before - the president should not be blamed for telling the world it went well.

"Can you ensure anything? You can't ensure anything," he said, giving a refreshingly frank appraisal of verification, and a rebuttal to the typical game of pretend that one country can thoroughly monitor the secret doings of another.

"All I can say is they want to make a deal. That's what I do. My whole life has been deals. I have done great at it."

Yes, that was Trump being Trump and he could have left the self-flattery out. Avoiding nuclear annihilation is a different deal than, say, buying property on the Boardwalk.

It's not all about him, it's all about Earth. But those who despise Trump should ask themselves what better course of action they'd have recommended.

When Trump has rattled sabres, he's been blasted as a warmonger. Ignoring North Korea entirely is a diplomatic trick that doesn't make their nukes vanish.

That leaves talking. Obama was willing to talk to Iran, Cuba and other nations known for hostility toward us.

What Trump is doing is no different - except it's Trump doing it. That will make it taste like poison to many people who equated people like Carter and Obama with Gandhi.

The summit was not about North Korean atrocities. It was not about the moral character of Trump or, for that matter, Kim. It was about commencing a dialogue to ease nuclear tensions between two nuke-bearing nations - period.

Yet some media and critics have taken the occasion to highlight North Korea's ghastly human rights violations, as if this were breaking news. The stories are not fake news. The atrocities are real.

But they were also real in 1994, when Carter met with Kim Il-Sung as a liaison for President Clinton. They were real during Obama's eight years in office.

Rarely was the subject of North Korean atrocities, and what the United States could do about them, brought up. Nobody blamed Carter, Clinton or Obama for the horrors in North Korea.

Making issue of them now is a furtive way of implicitly connecting Trump's name to them as a partner in crime. That's disingenuous, dishonest, and patently unfair.

Trump has lately alienated our allies in some needless ways, and even the South Koreans are confused, but it's hard to criticize him for declaring a cessation of Korean war games. They can always be resumed. For now, it's hard to tell the North Koreans or the world that we're serious about a peaceful resolution on the one hand, while continuing those exercises as if the talks had no meaning.

Was Trump duped by a monster who fed the president's ego by telling him what he wanted to hear? Is he the new Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister fooled by Adolph Hitler in 1938?

Time will tell and, despite Trump's upbeat predictions, there is still need for concern. But the same critics who have blasted Trump's diplomatic recklessness must now confront that he actually sat down in serious, face-to-face talks about serious problems with another nation's leader, which is exactly what those critics usually say a world leader should do.

Fair is fair. If the Trump haters invent ways to say otherwise, they will only reveal that their hatred has overcome their sense of reason, leaving the rest of us to wonder why we should take their anti-Trump rants seriously in the future.